I’ve always strived to make sure that my advertising sites provide high quality traffic and results, and one way to ensure that is by preventing any cheaters or automated software from working on my sites.
Besides having some ways to detect bots behind the scenes, the visible anti-cheat has come in the form of a captcha that looks like this:
The problem with having any type of anti-cheat that disrupts a user from their normal tasks is that you must strike a balance between effectiveness and being an annoying obstruction.
Some sites in our industry have no visible anti-cheat at all, and my results have always been very low or non-existent at such sites. Most sites don’t use a captcha but instead have you match an image, and you have to do that after every single ad you view, which I feel is a bit too obstructive.
With my sites I went the captcha route because it is the most difficult to cheat, and instead of having it display after every ad it displays much more infrequently just to ensure that it is still a human at work.
Even a captcha has a downside though, and that comes in the form of their extremely highly secure puzzles that even a human has trouble figuring out.
I’ve made a change to use our default captcha as the Google ReCaptcha which should be the easiest to solve for most people. But I didn’t stop there.. since Google’s Recaptcha is not available everywhere and since many may prefer our original captcha from SolveMedia, you can choose which anti-cheat you want to use in your account profile! I’ve never heard of anyone allowing their users to choose their type of anti-cheat so this is probably a first. Just login to your account and go to your account profile settings and you will see the option “Solve anti-cheat by” and you can you choose either Google’s ReCaptcha or SolveMedia.
Even more, you can switch your preference on the fly.. so if you find yourself having trouble with one in particular, you can change your option.. wait a minute and then refresh and you’ll be solving the new form of captcha.
Anti-cheat done your way is now LIVE on:
Adchiever.com
ListSurfing.com
ListJumper.com
ViralNugget.com
BuildMyDownlines.com
DownlineMaxx.com
Thank you for being an active member of my sites and I appreciate any feedback!
All the best,
Darren Olander
Great idea!
Good to see this Darren. Always on the cutting edge. Keep it up!
Thanks Kenny, I appreciate that!
Great news
Look forward to receiving more information on how to effectively use Ads Traffic through LeadsLeap
Having anti-cheat measures in place is definitely the lesser of 2 evils – it’s better having to do annoying captchas and puzzles every now and again than getting pretend traffic that gets you no leads and, more importantly – no commish.
That’s definitely how I see it too, thanks for sharing Peter!
Darren,
I am a member of all of the sites listed above and I hope to start taking advantage of them more and more now that I can start my online business without being disrupted by a job.
For my part I prefer the Google ReCaptcha or the SolveMedia over whatever it was Google was using just before they pulled the Keyword Search Tool and replaced it with the Keyword Planner. I would have to try about ten times every time I used it and I have found that type of Captcha in other places that are near impossible to solve sometimes or it least it felt that way.
Thanks for a great article and giving us a choice 🙂
Sincerely,
Ken Damon
aka nomadkfd
Thanks Ken, yea Google has really done a good job on improving their captcha to make it easier on humans.
Thoughts on various anti-cheats …
My biggest problem with the anti-cheats is when they cause a lot of extra clicks. Click link in email, click tab, look for anti cheat, click if there, click to close tab, click back to email, click into the next email, click to find the credit link, click on link.
I keep riding the edge of carpal tunnel and those extra clicks can physically hurt. If I know how often one’s coming up, then I can keep count in my head. If it’s a multiple of 25 I don’t even have to do that. Setting my gmail to 25 emails keeps it simple. Having the first anti-cheat come up when I first start a new batch in x time, also helps and makes it more likely that I’ll start a mailbox when there’s only 10 or 15 emails in it.
Open a bunch, then look at them one by one with the closing click in the same place without having to move more. Get the gain without the pain.
For those safelists that do the matching images, If it’s something I’m not already in or I haven’t seen before or want to check out I’m much more likely to actually look at it if I’m not having to watch the safelist equivalent of a surf bar, especially if the match is something I have to think about or that have colors or numbers that are hard to see. The eyes aren’t what they used to be either 🙁
The worst though, are those that you have to open one by one and wait for the timer before you can even open another. I don’t mind if the timer doesn’t start until the tab has focus. That means that people have to look at mine for that long too. I can still minimize the clicks by opening a bunch and then waiting through the timer on each one. I’ve found a tab limit of 10 is about the minimum I’m comfortable with.
One other note, a bit off topic, but still dealing with clicks, is the location of the click link in the email. If it’s at the very end it means you always have to scroll down with the mouse to click it. – more wrist flexure. If there’s at least 8 to 10 lines or so under the click link, then it’s at the top of the email reader pane and the wrist can stay straight while I move down with the PgDn key on the other hand.
Just my ten cents worth (keeping inflation in mind) 🙂
Diane
Those are very good points Diane, some I did not think about, so thank you very much for sharing!
Good idea and glad to see. We have used it for a few months with great success too.
That’s awesome to hear it’s going well, then I probably will not regret it 😀
Good!!
Hi Darren,
Thanks for going the extra mile and protective your clients/customers followers,etc.
I am not an expert at spotting cheating so it is got to know that you got my back!
Thanks and continued success!
Yvonne Finn